My Web Community

I have been doing a lot of thinking about ways to establish a presence on the web and possibly make a little money with it. I don't want to make this a new career or something that replaces my job (I love my job), I just want to do something that will help others in my life.

To be more specific, what led me to this thought was the idea of allowing my wife to use her love for the internet in a more profitable and fulfilling way. Also, my brother is interested in staying at home with his children and is looking for some work at home ideas. He's already tried a couple of things that I am afraid are scams. We'll have to wait and see. But it gave me the impetus to start thinking it through more carefully. After a great deal of research, I have come up with the following. If you have any thoughts on this, please let me know.

My idea is to create a web-based community similar to the communities many people grew up in. The community I am thinking of is one in which you know your neighbors and they are always willing to lend a helping hand. I know there are many people who grew up in communities where there was little interaction amongst neighbors. I have experienced both and much prefer the former.

In my web-based community (for now I'll refer to it as "WebCom" although I think someone could come up with a much better name) each person knows the neighbors and the skills/talents those neighbors have. For example, I am a civil engineer who specializes in environmental issues (particularly landfill related issues). If a neighbor wants to build a retaining wall or has questions about a landfill to be located near their child's school, they could ask my opinion. I tell them what I can about the issue - for free. I share my knowledge to help a neighbor. In turn, if I have an automotive question, I locate a neighbor that has relevant experience and ask their opinion. That's the gist of it.

One big obstacle that I see would be legal issues related to bad advice. I would, for example, have to have some sort of disclaimer that my opinion was not being offered as a Professional Engineering opinion. I can't put my license on the line for someone I have never met or received compensation from. The ideal here would be to have a legal expert in the WebCom that could recommend proper disclaimers and such.

I have a couple of ideas on how to structure the community:

The first idea is to have it completely within my webspace (which I don't currently have). With this structure, I would provide the webhosting (probably through another provider) and neighbors would have to pay me or the webhosting company a "move-in" fee or "rent" to establish their home(page).

The second idea is to let the neighbors setup their own homes wherever they want and submit links to me. This might be the easiest and cheapest way to handle it. I need to consider that aspect more. Any thoughts anyone?

Other concerns I have are as follows:

Politics - do we limit the politics and other hot-button topics so as to make this a less confrontational community. I don't think so but it is worth considering.

Referrals - I would need some sort of good database software to track the links by skills and talents so that new residents can quickly find what they need.

Subscriptions - In order to make this work, I would want everyone to be willing to share their talents rather than just get info from others and never give anything back. I could require users to subscribe and pay but that will likely drive away some useful people along with the bad. I probably wouldn't sign up for something like that. Maybe a better idea would be a kind of rating system that tracked a user's "advice given" versus "advice requested" ratio. If it's not above a certain level (after adequate usage), I might not respond to a question from the user. That sounds promising.

Marketing - How would I get the word out about the community. I hate spam. I don't want to spend a lot as I don't expect to generate a lot of revenue.

Favorites - I would want to have it set up so that each home-owner could choose their neighbors which would simply be adding a resident to their favorites section. It could be made neat though. Maybe even have addresses and a map or something like that.

Family members pages - For my "home", I would like to have separate "rooms" for me, my wife, and my daughter. My wife might have a blog about homeschooling activities. My daughter might tell what she has learned each week. I could even have a guest room where relatives or friends "spend some time" occasionally.

To offset the costs of the webspace and the time spent , each family could choose their own advertising. From what I have seen thus far, adsense by Google is probably the easiest to seet up but I don't know that much about it yet. My guess is that you would not have the ability to control who advertises on your page. I don't know that that would be acceptable to me. Of course, if I am getting a decent amount of traffic, I might be able to sell the ad space directly to an advertiser. Home Depot comes to mind as well as the company that would be hosting my site.

It needs some more work and research but it is the best idea I have come up with so far. Any thoughts would be appreciated.